1/48 Academy Mirage IIIR in NATO Tiger Meet Scheme

Gallery Article by Rahul Kulkarni on Jan 26 2020

India Republic Day

 

      

This is my first time to post on ARC. I am a rookie modeler from Pune, India. I have been modelling from 2018. I bought this Academy kit from eBay as it was in 1/48 scale and available at a lower price. This was going to be my first 1/48 scale model too. I was surprised to see that it was a relatively simple kit with less detail and more inaccuracies. So I decided to go up for a challenge and make it in a sort of crazy scheme. I came across an image of Mirage IIIR on Airliners.Net painted in the NATO Tiger Meet color scheme. I absolutely loved the colors on it. This was something special that I wanted to create.

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With only the image above as my reference, I began assembling the kit. The fit went really well with less putty, filling and sanding required. I used white primer of MiG Ammo and allowed it to dry for over a week. After that, I airbrushed Tamiya Yellow all over the model. Then used thinned down Fevicol (Indian equivalent of to Elmer’s glue) to mask the stripes and NATO Black over it. Allowed it to dry completely for a couple of days and then removed the dried Fevicol carefully, by soaking the model in warm water. Ta Da! The Tiger got its stripes at last. I thoroughly enjoyed the painting process.

Assembled the landing gears used thin chalk pastel wash for the landing gear bays and coated the model with two coats of Future Klear. The kit is very basic and contains no internal detail. I built the kit OOB. I self-printed the decals for French Air Force roundels as the ones that came with the kit broke up on coming in contact with water.

The kit looks great once completed. I'm happy with the end result.

Rahul Kulkarni

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Photos and text © by Rahul Kulkarni